The invention relates to a conveying arrangement including a roller supporting chain whose chain links, at their ends, are connected by articulation pins and have projections, preferably designed as cylinder segments, that overlap each other.
In the course of the automation of metallurgical plants, the problem of transporting slabs to the processing stations by means of continuous conveyors has increasingly come up.
It is known to use roller supporting chains, i.e. steel lug chains running on rollers, for the heaviest loads. When using such chains in metallurgical plants, in particular for conveying slabs in flame scarfing machines, disturbances of the conveying process will be caused by contamination, in particular from the emerging cinders which deposit both on the chain runway and on the chains themselves. The cinders, which emerge in very fine particles in flame scarfing plants, penetrate into the rolling bearings, thus destroying them.
Furthermore, a conveying arrangement of the initially-described kind is known whose chain links are trough-shaped and which carry shovels that stand off from the links. These shovels serve for transporting solid, fine-particle material. The known conveying arrangement can also be used as a crawler for vehicles. This known chain is not suitable for transporting heavy, one-piece loads, such as slabs, since the shovels that stand off from the links are each arranged on an outer projection at one end of the link that overlaps an inner projection on the adjacent link, thus under load a deformation of these projections will occur, which would cause jamming of this known chain.